[-empyre-] PS queer new media artists

[Margaret Rhee]

What current artists do you think are doing or have done queer new media?
Are you? Who are your inspirations?

*

So I wanted to respond to the question above rereading some of the emails
and wanted to direct the question for Zach, Amanda, and Micha. I get to
wake up to responses because of the time difference and I'd love to hear
you all in conversation. I love your queer new media work very much and
feel your work has and does lead and create a queer new media movement in
which I've always been moved and thankful for, intellectually,
artistically and politically. Beautiful interlocutors. So, I'd love to
hear you all in conversation around your respective work, on questions of
queer technology, form, and what I've been thinking about on "queer is
everywhere."

I'd love to hear from Amanda on how embodying butchness and creating
butchness in gaming informs your scholarly work and how it may trouble
and/or expand definitions of play? How might play be a political
intervention? and a queer intervention? How about race? Does #TRANSFORM DH
play or game?

Like Amanda's work, I'm interested in Micha's interventions of gaming and
virtual worlds including conversations within trans discourses and
troubling the animal/human/machine divides. Your current project  Local
Autonomy Networks – Autonets is dedicated to using technology for social
change. Could we say a queer new media intervention is the political and
not only attention to, but the utilization of technology for social
change? ie computers that not only sense the world but change the world?

Micha's Becoming Dragon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHEDym1aOZs

For Zach I'm interested and fascinated by Queer Technologies and myriad of
forms, tangibly too.  I love how Zach's work rewires form through actual
packaging and place, Apple Stores beware! and it seems so vital in how QT
blurs pranks, queers the boundaries between queer::technology::art. Is
queer everywhere?

http://www.zachblas.info/projects/queer-technologies-2/

Im wondering if you all and others on this listserve can discuss
transgression in relation to queer and new media? What does
queer--theoretically, artistically, and politically--offer and intervene
in the field of new media studies and new media art? I think its vital
queer and feminist and justice is included centrally within new media
studies, but as we all know, this inclusion is not always the case.  Im
really thankful for the time to work through these questions together!

love,

Margaret







> Greetings all. Thank you Micha and Zach for curating an amazing queer
dialogue for the month of June! It will be nice to celebrate ‘pride’ or
‘shame’ virtually this month and with the amazing thinkers and artists
you’ve curated and new friends of empyre. Thank you Renate Ferro for the
kind introduction to the listserve. It is exciting to discuss queer new
media art here. And it is always great to reengage on queer new media
art
> with dear friend Amanda Phillips again, of course.  In response to the
emails sent, I have a few thoughts in response and discussion.
> I’m interested in queer family romance? New media as queer? Queer as new
media?
> In April I participated in a roundtable with Martin Manalansan who said,
“Queer is Messy.”  I loved that so much.  I’m also interested in “Queer
is
> Trouble.” and right now, how “Queer is Everywhere.”
> I love Shu Lea Cheang’s 'Brandon' because it honors the memory of
Brandon
> Teena in such a poignant, political, and participatory way, but also
love
> how the piece and Shu Lea Cheang’s positionality troubles the boundaries
of ‘new media art’ ‘asian american art’ ‘queer art.' So yes, I believe
there is such a thing as queer new media art as Micha asks, but I’m also
interested in how queer new media art tends to make a mess, to trouble,
and demonstrates how it is everywhere, even if you don’t think you see
it.
>  Because we want to try to have all folks regardless of sexual
preference
> or gender identity, etc,  as Cathy Davidson writes to See It… ie
everyone
> is queer, and/or can be queer. or should be queer.
> In terms of new media art, I’m interested in questions of formalism. ie
as
> you write Micha in regards to Cathy’s work, the paperback novel was an
invention and is new media. Today’s digital ecology allows for a myriad
of
> queer relationships between the old and the new for artists. I also
think
> that is queer. Im thinking about my dear friend artist and poet Jai Arun
Ravine’s work as a dancer, poet, and filmmaker of the transmasculine
diasporia. The boundaries between forms are blurred which trouble our
assumptions and boundaries of embodiment. ie new media forces us to
think
> outside the frames of the national/transnational, dancer/poet, het/homo…
http://jaiarunravine.wordpress.com/tomtransthai/
> Right now, I am reminded of the images of tulips on the window in front
of
> me, which overlooks rice paddies of the beautiful countryside of Korea.
I
> am here for the week until I leave for Yonsei, and I’ll be writing you
all
> from here. Did you all know tulips are intersex? Did you know the most
precious kinds of tulips are viral?
> If we can believe Art Is Everywhere” we can think about how “Queer is
Everywhere” as we walk through the days of our living. and trying to be
human.
> So to begin
> I want to share with you my narrative mapping of
> Queer is everywhere. Here.
> Yesterday.  Enroute to the “Human and Machine” posthumanism conference.
On the subway going to Seoul from Kyunggi.  Four boys (around 11 or 12?)
are playing Kai, Bai, Bo! on the subway.  They are all hysterically
laughing, making a ruckus, having great fun. The loser has to run out
the
> subway door at the next stop, touch a wall, and run back in time.  Two
of
> the boys were wearing wigs, long flowing black hair with fashionable
bangs.  If they didn’t speak and laugh, they could pass.  I wish I took
a
> photo but I didn’t because sometimes moments like that just are.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq9cAZxki9Y&feature=related
> I was on my way to the posthumanism conference of the transhumanities at
Ehwa University. It’s my first time in Korea.  I love seeing the young
boys, hearing their laughter, and admiring their wigs, such a wonderful
sign. I feel at home.
> At the Human and Machine conference, I recognize the Korean camera
operator as a butch.  I love her swagger, how the side of her hair is
queerly fashionably shaved off, how she places the camera and positions
it
> so adamantly with her hands.  I think she sees me too. I wonder if
others
> know.  Does she pass?
> A new Korean friend escorted me around Seoul yesterday from the subway
to
> the conference and throughout the day’s events.  After the conference,
she
> told me, I think the speaker was surprised when you opened your mouth
and
> spoke perfect English, because you look 100% Korean.
> Do I pass?
> My early undergraduate work was an analysis of LGBTQ images in a Korean
American magazine.  That research was all about me.  ie as an
> undergraduate I wondered why was it so hard to be Korean American and
LGBTQ? Why was there homophobia in the KA community? What knowledge and
intervention could media offer us? That thesis was published as my first
academic article in a 2006 issue of Amerasia Journal on same sex
marriage
> http://www.amerasiajournal.org/blog/?p=1806
> Some questions always remain.
> A queer Korean studies colleague of mine, Brian, just moved to Seoul and
we meet in 이태원 yesterday night after the conference.  We decided to grab
some beers and eat dinner at an Eastern European restaurant. The waiter
came by, and says hi.  From his eyeliner and his fabulous swish, we
confer
> that he’s family.
> Brian tells me later, you still have to be careful, here.
> On my plane trip to Seoul from the U.S, I sat next to a young man from
the
> U.S. from Seattle, of Swedish descent, he teaches English in Korea, and
he
> wants to be a fiction writer.  We become friends.  He asks me why I was
going to Korea. I tell him about the Queer Feminist conference I will be
presenting at Yonsei University.  Oh, he says, I’m interested in that
topic because my mother is a lesbian too.
> I decide I like him not because he's queer spawn but its evident he
loves
> his mother very much and he seems like a good person.
> Is Queer everywhere.
> Is Media everywhere.
> Are We everywhere.
> ?
>> For week 1, Zach and I have invited two digital humanities scholars to
get the month's discussion started with us.
>> The term new media is clearly problematic, and we wish to further
problematize and think through this. Cathy Davidson writes in Now You
See It that the paperback novel was once seen as new media, carrying
with it the same accusations that digital technologies today receive:
distracting, corrupting, pulling users into another world. Perhaps a
better term is queer digital media, as we are interested in the
intersections of queerness with digital technologies, networked
technologies and forms we may see as post-network or post-digital, like
alternate reality gaming. But digital media also seems to be inadequate
today, given developments in bio and nanotechnologies. To say that
Queer New Media is emerging is not to deny that it exists. It is
crucial to acknowledge important inspirations such as Shu Lea Cheang,
VNS Matrix, Subrosa, Cyberfeminist and new media artists and theorists
who have considered the emerging possibilities for
>> embodiment resulting from new technologies.
>> To start some discussion, here are a few questions:
>> What are the relations you see and understand today between queerness
and new media? What is it that makes you desire (or not desire)
engaging this topic?
>> Do you agree that queer new media or queer media art is an emerging art
movement? Or art/theory/political movement?
>> What current artists do you think are doing or have done queer new
media? Are you? Who are your inspirations?
>> This week's guests are:
>> Guests:
>> Amanda Phillips (US) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English
with an emphasis in Feminist Studies at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. Her dissertation takes a vertical slice of the video
games industry to look at how difference is produced and policed on
multiple levels of the gamic system: discourse, hardware, software,
representation, and corporate practice. Her interests more broadly are
in queer, feminist, and antiracist discourses in and around
>> technoculture, popular media, and the digital humanities. In addition
to participating in the 2010 NEH-sponsored Humanities Gaming
>> Institute, Amanda has been a HASTAC Scholar since 2009 and hosted, in
conjunction with Margaret Rhee, an online HASTAC Forum on Queer and
Feminist New Media Spaces, the organization’s most-commented forum to
date. She has presented at the conferences for UCLA Queer Studies, the
American Studies Association, the Popular Culture Association, and the
Conference on College Composition and Communication, and has
>> participated in unconferences such as HASTAC’s Peer-to-Peer Pedagogies
Workshop, THATCamp SoCal, and the Transcriptions Research Slam. Most
recently, she has been involved with the #transformDH Collective's
efforts to encourage and highlight critical cultural studies work in
digital humanities projects.
>> Margaret Rhee (US/Korea) is a doctoral candidate in Ethnic Studies with
a designated emphasis in New Media Studies at the University of
California, Berkeley. She is conceptualist and co-lead of From the
Center, a feminist collective that aims to provide digital media access
and education for women inside and outside the jail setting as authors,
directors, and storytellers of their own lives. website:
http://ourstorysf.org/ She co-curated HASTAC Scholars "Queer and
Feminist New Media Spaces" with Amanda Phillips in 2010. Her interests
include posthumanism and race, Asian American cultural critique, and
queer theory.
>> Weclome! And let’s start discussing!
>> --
>> micha cárdenas
>> PhD Student, Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California
Provost Fellow, University of Southern California
>> New Directions Scholar, USC Center for Feminist Research
>> MFA, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego
>> Author, The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities,
http://amzn.to/x8iJcY
>> blog: http://transreal.org
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